but i do think the difference here is unlike the debt ceiling which has the huge, global third party implications whether the government refinances itself, this is an invention of congress. they've decided please, tie my hands so i don't do it again. i do think therefore there's flexibility in whether they defer it or somehow play it some other way. >> bill: michael our guest finance writer for yahoo. all of this revolves, of course around the debt and the deficit. isn't it also true that we've made significant paydowns of the debt now and that's not -- so big, right but not as serious a problem as it was a year ago. >> this i think is kind of the under tone. it is not being talked about loudly. i do think it is the context for a lot of decisions. no debt has gotten paid down. we're running annual deficits. the absolute size of the government's debt gets bigger but the size of the deaf -- deficits have gone to under a trillion a year this year which no changes no effort really to actually do anything except for the economy to improve tax receipts to go up and you know, lower spending